Skipping Towards Gomorrah (42 page)

Here's an interesting fact: Nowhere in the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah are the men of Gomorrah mentioned. They don't crowd around Lot's house, demanding to “know” the visiting angels. Maybe there was a pride parade in Gomorrah that night—or a rap concert or a swingers' convention or a riverboat casino was opening—and the men of Gomorrah couldn't tear themselves away. On this point, the Bible is silent.

While the men of Gomorrah were up to God only knows what (and God, the Bible's author, isn't telling), it's clear that the men of Sodom wanted to subject the strangers at Lot's place to a mob rape. Many scholars believe that the account emphasizes the social aspect of the sin of Sodom, rather than the sexual aspect. The men of Sodom desired to humiliate and dehumanize the strangers, not enjoy sexual pleasure with them. The men of Sodom were breaking the sacred law of hospitality, since the angels are Lot's guests, and a good host isn't supposed to let his guests come to harm. (Lot's daughters, on the other hand . . .) Since the men of Sodom are such pricks, God decides to destroy both cities, “raining brimstone and fire on Sodom and Gomorrah, from the Lord out of his heavens.”

By no stretch of the imagination is the United States of America “slouching towards Gomorrah.” We may have a lot of those trendy cafés, performance art spaces, gay bars, and alternative weekly newspapers, and while we tolerate a huge number of things specifically forbidden in the Bible (shellfish, bacon, cheeseburgers, leg-shaving, divorce, adulterers, uncircumcised males, gays and lesbians, and so on), we
don't
tolerate the kind of mob violence that any unbiased reading of the Sodom and Gomorrah story reveals to be God's beef with the citizens of those doomed cities. The sinners of Sodom and Gomorrah, unlike modern American sinners, weren't content to sin with other sinners and leave virtuous Lot and his virtuous daughters and those virtuous angels the hell out of it. The men of Sodom sought to impose their sinful ways on Lot's guests, to violate and humiliate them, to “know” them in the biblical sense. (Picture an episode of HBO's
Oz
crossed with CBS's
Touched by an Angel
.) The people of Sodom and Gomorrah went from tolerably wicked in God's eyes to I'm-going-to-nuke-this-place wicked when they attempted to force their sins down the throats (or up the butts) of unwilling participants. (If the men of Sodom had contented themselves with raping Lot's virgin daughters, God might have spared the place.) While the men of Sodom and Gomorrah (and the children and women, too, I assume, since God destroyed them along with any unborn children the women were carrying at the time) were sinful, it wasn't until they tried to impose their sins on others that God pressed the button.

As I said at the beginning of this book, modern American sinners don't attempt to impose their sinful ways on their fellow Americans. We may do things that are injurious to ourselves—eat too much, gamble too much, fuck too much, shoot too much—but if it makes us happy, that's our right, and, remember, we were endowed with that right by our Creator, and our founding fathers saw fit to enshrine that right in our nation's founding document. Anyone who strives to deprive his or her fellow Americans of their right to pursue happiness is not only violating the original intent of founding fathers,
but also flying in the face of God.
(Take that, Alan Keyes!) As much as it annoys the virtuecrats and talk-show moralists, the American sinners have the same rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as any other American. Bork, Bennett, and Buchanan are free to believe that our pursuit of happiness is sinful, just as we are free to believe that their virtues are vastly overrated.

Unlike Andrew Sullivan, I'm not convinced that the paleoconservative scolds are on their way out. Indeed, I think they're going to be with us for a long, long time. As I write these words, Patrick Buchanan's
Death of the West
remains on the
New York Times
best-seller lists, and books by his fellow scolds dot
Amazon.com
's Top 100 list. There are apparently a huge number of Americans, registered Republicans all, who never seem to tire of being told that they live in a morally bankrupt shithole; these people will keep American virtuecrats and scolds in book deals and speaking gigs for the rest of their natural lives. Isn't it odd how the same conservatives who complain about “blame America first” lefties never challenge the “nothing nice to say about America” paleoconservatives?

Books by virtuecrats and scolds go on for three or four hundred pages about what a shithole this country is—this Gomorrah, this moral sewer, this dismal state, these morally collapsed United States—but they all end with a paragraph or two of uplift. Bork, Bennett, and Buchanan all hold out hope at the end of their books. If she heeds the call of the virtuecrats and the scolds, America can right herself: “. . . The blessings of marriage and family life are indeed recoverable,” Bennett writes at the end of
The Broken Hearth
. “If we do our part, there is reason to hope that those blessings may yet again be ours.”

“We have so much to be thankful for,” Buchanan writes at the end of
Death of the West
. “And while no one can deny the coarseness of her manners, the decadence of her culture, or the sickness in her soul, America is still a country worth fighting for and the last best hope of earth.”

“We have allowed [our nation] to be severely damaged,” Bork writes at the end of
Slouching Towards Gomorrah,
“but perhaps not beyond repair. As we approach the desolate and sordid precincts, the pessimism of the intellect tells us that Gomorrah is our probable destination. What is left to us is a determination not to accept that fate and the courage to resist it. . . .”

Like Bork, Bennett, and Buchanan, I'd like to end with a few hopeful words. Unlike Bork, Bennett, and Buchanan, I'm not tacking a few hopeful words onto the end of four hundred pages of “this place sucks,” “moral sewer,” “slouching towards Gomorrah,” or “what a dump.” I don't think my country is a shithole. Indeed, I agree with Buchanan that America is the “last best hope of earth,” and, like Bennett, I believe the United States is worth fighting for—these United States—not some 1950s era dream of the United States. The country worth fighting for is the big, messy, complicated, diverse, fascinating place the United States is right now. What makes the United States the envy of the world (besides Hooters and Krispy Kremes, of course) is that this is a nation where full citizenship has nothing to do with race, religion, sex, political persuasion or, yes, personal virtue. Good or bad, religious or irreligious, male or female, left or right, of color or washed out—we're all Americans.

This is a country where the culture evolves and remains vibrant because people are free to challenge the existing order. The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness means that each of us is free to go our own way, even if the ways some of us may choose to go seem sinful or shocking to some of our fellow citizens. America is at its best when our freedom to go our own way is restricted only when, as Thomas Jefferson said, “[our] acts are injurious to others.”

So like Bork, Bennett, and Buchanan, I have hope. I hope that people who disagree with the scolds and the virtuecrats will go right on ignoring them; I hope that our drug laws will one day be changed to reflect reality; I hope that more people who want to cheat on their spouses will do so with their spouses' permission; and I hope to one day spot Bill O'Reilly at a gay pride parade in heels and a bra. I hope that Americans who find happiness in sinful pursuits will always be able to exercise their God-given right to gamble, swing, smoke, eat, shoot, march, spend, and procure. And I hope that the Borks, Bennetts, and Buchanans will one day recognize that their right to pursue happiness as they define it is not threatened by the right of their fellow Americans to pursue happiness as we define it. It's a big country, after all, with plenty of room for saints and sinners alike.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I had help.

For his many insights, his patience, and his good humor, I would like to thank my thoroughly brilliant editor Brian Tart. For blending encouragement and nagging so effortlessly, I have to thank my literary agent, Elizabeth Wales. My research assistant, Sean Taylor, contributed huge piles of facts and figures, in addition to providing me with above-and-beyond-the-call constructive criticisms. And thanks to Amy Hughes at Dutton for keeping so many balls in the air at once.

My brother, Bill Savage, to whom I've dedicated this book, is full of good advice and total bullshit in roughly equal measures—which pretty much makes him the ideal older brother. Bill read early and late drafts, encouraged me to keep writing, and got me completely shit-faced one night in Chicago when I was in despair of ever finishing this project. Thanks, Billy.

Much thanks to my good friends Tim Keck, Mike Ranta, David Schmader, Brad Steinbacher, John Goodman, and Jason Sellards for their support and encouragement. Thanks to the staff at the Tully's at the corner of Second and Marion in downtown Seattle, where I was allowed to sit all day for weeks while working on an early draft of this book; to Cafe Luna on Vashon Island; and to the staff of Cafe Septieme for keeping me fed while I worked twenty-hour days to meet my final deadlines. I wouldn't have been able to write this book at all if the card dealers, drug pushers, whores, adulterers, faggots, gun nuts, and gluttons I met along the way hadn't been so indulgent. Thanks, gang.

I wouldn't be able to finish this project—or any project—if it weren't for the love and support of my boyfriend, Terry, and my son, D.J.

Finally, I can't close without thanking William J. Bennett, Patrick Buchanan, and, of course, Robert Bork for inspiring me to write this book.

 

For a complete list of sources and notes, please visit the Web site,

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dan Savage is the author of
The Kid
and
Savage Love
. He is the author of the internationally syndicated column “Savage Love” and the editor of
The Stranger,
an alternative weekly in Seattle. He lives in Seattle, Washington.